Try These Tips to Locate Someone's Email Address

John Rusnak

With so many people connected to the Internet, correspondence via 
electronic mail has soared. Yet while sending email is easy, tracking 
down a person's email address can be difficult. This article gives tips 
on finding email addresses for people outside of MIT. (To learn how to 
find the email addresses of MIT community members, request the MITnet 
Online Directory Quick Guide [QG-18] by calling x3-5150 or sending e-
mail to <sendpubs@mit.edu>).

Be advised at the outset that your searches may not always be 
successful. For this reason, your best bet is to ask a person for their 
email address if you intend to correspond with them.

At Educational Institutions
Many colleges and universities put their student and staff information 
online and make it readily available to outsiders. To look for an email 
address in this category, check to see if the college has a Web page. A 
list of such pages, maintained by former MIT student Christina DeMello, 
is available at

http://web.mit.edu/cdemello/www/univ.html

Many schools with Web pages provide links to their online directories.

Another method is to use your Web browser to connect to

gopher://gopher.mit.edu/

and then to select Other Information Servers->Other Institutions On-Line 
Directory. From there you can narrow your search by continent and by 
school. Once you pick the desired school, enter the person's name in the 
search field.

At Commercial Institutions
Most businesses do not make their internal information as freely 
available as educational institutions do. Still, there are ways to find 
or make an educated guess about a person's email address if they are 
affiliated with a company. To start, you can use WHOIS, a gopher-based 
service that you can get to via the Web by opening

gopher://rs.internic.net/7waissrc%3A/rs/whois.src

In the search field, enter the name of the company where the person 
works - for example, lotus.com (commercial addresses end in .com). If 
you use Athena, at the athena% prompt you can enter the command

whois lotus.com

Next, look for the email address of the contact person listed in the 
company's WHOIS data. Since many companies follow a uniform format for 
email addresses, you can guess at an em-ployee's email address by 
mimicking the address of the contact person. If the email address of 
contact Bill Smith is <bsmith@company.com>, there's a good chance that 
the email address of co-worker Lucy Mikado will be 
<lmikado@company.com>.

At Online Services
Some people connect to the Internet via a commercial service provider 
such as America Online, CompuServe, or Prodigy. It is very difficult to 
find or guess email addresses of subscribers to these services, because 
the service providers want to protect their customer's personal data.

To search for the email address of online subscribers - or any Internet 
user - check out one of the Internet White Page services.

Internet White Pages 
Internet White Page services provide the most comprehensive method of 
looking for email addresses. You can access many of these services by 
going to the Directory menu in Netscape and selecting Internet White 
Pages. Two such services include Four11 and WhoWhere?, which you can 
find at

http://www.four11.com/

and

http://www.whowhere.com/

Each White Page service has its own interface, and different services 
employ different methods to gather email addresses. Some search through 
Usenet postings, while others rely on Internet users to add their own 
information. With some experimenting, you can find the White Page 
service that gives you the best results.